Why do "Retro" games sabotage themselves?

[maglag]

Of course in the case of an undead invasion of your average sword-and-sorcery fiefdom, trying to gouge adventurers during a crisis like that is a good way to get murdered and your entire stock "expropriated", in contrast to the typical behavior of MtG tournament-goers.

I believe that by definition, in D&D "merchant" means either:
1)guy who's strong enough to pose a threat to the party but is willing to barter his personal goods instead of rolling for initiative right away.
2)guy who is protected by an higher authority who will hunt and murder the party if they murder the merchant.

If either 1) or 2) aren't true, then your average D&D party will just murderize whoever's in front of them and take the goods they want, even if the other side wasn't trying to gouge the prices.

I've seen plenty of MTG players be almost as bad plenty of times, from "me and my friends are gonna surround you and use violence not let you go anywhere until you agree to trade that super foil rare you just opened for some crappy cards" and "you took your eyes out of your cards for a second? They're gone now and nobody saw anything".

[violence in the media]

I had an idea for a further complication on magical item randomness, taking advantage of the idea that this whole thing would be a program:

What if you randomized the value of the mystical components prior to each campaign? So, in some campaigns, Fire Giant hearts are potent enchanting items, and in others they're nearly useless. You'd have a seed value that was set at the beginning and then used for all magical item randomization for the rest of the campaign; so Fire Giant hearts would retain their relative level of utility through the whole campaign. Next campaign, you could re-roll the seed and change everything up and have the players rediscover things, or just keep using the same seed so your group can retain the knowledge they've acquired of how things work.

[Username17]

I had an idea for a further complication on magical item randomness, taking advantage of the idea that this whole thing would be a program:

What if you randomized the value of the mystical components prior to each campaign? So, in some campaigns, Fire Giant hearts are potent enchanting items, and in others they're nearly useless. You'd have a seed value that was set at the beginning and then used for all magical item randomization for the rest of the campaign; so Fire Giant hearts would retain their relative level of utility through the whole campaign. Next campaign, you could re-roll the seed and change everything up and have the players rediscover things, or just keep using the same seed so your group can retain the knowledge they've acquired of how things work.

That sounds really cool. I figure the net effect would usually be that players would guess and check a few things until they found something that was over leveled, and then they'd go nuts alchemizing up some equipment above their tier. But... that actually sounds pretty awesome.

The big draw to me is that players would end up finding their best gear inputs surprisingly and that the type would be a surprise as well. So players might end up with really cool "frost" gear or really cool "madness" gear, and that would be a surprise. But they'd still have agency as to what they used and why and the "surprise" component wouldn't feel like the DM was "surprising" you by laying out his favorite fetish wear for you to put on.

That being said, while properly "old school," I don't really want to stick my hand into the bowels or chest cavity of defeated monsters any more. I would prefer it if there was a story reason for magical creatures to show up next to caches of magical ingredients. Like how in Master of Magic, Chaos Creatures congregate in Chaos Nodes. Could be something as simple as "Cockatrices happen when a Dust Chrysanthemum blooms near a chicken egg. If you see Cockatrices, the Dust Chrysanthemum cannot be far." Or something more esoteric like power rifts that make mana crystals and attract associated monsters. I just really don't want to carve the hearts out of humanoids to make my magic go. Unless I'm playing a blood magus necromaster or something, in which case bring on the butchery.

-Username17

[violence in the media]

Oh, yeah, none of the components have to be vital body parts--those are just placeholder names for whatever the power components might wind up being. That said, I think there's still room for stuff like fur, feathers, and whatnot. You can make monster butchery a thing that's never profitable if you want to.

[Lokathor]

As I was saying in the Mass Combat thread, the implementation of such a webpage sort of thing is pretty easy. Deciding on the rule set for the webpage to play out and display is hard.

But I'll totally do it if you guys come up with a system.

[Hiram McDaniels]

Just to name a couple, let's talk about skill systems. 2nd Edition AD&D had several skill systems that were all half assed and explicitly optional (although the assumption that you were going to be using Non-Weapon Proficiencies and Thief skills became more and more explicit as more books were written and rules bloat needed something to hang its hat on). Now I wouldn't say any of them worked particularly well, but compared to how immediately and severely the ranks system of 3e goes off the rails, they are a breath of fresh air.

Simply put: if skills are supposed to be mundane bullshit that low level people can do with the kind of "has thumbs and knowhow" that mortal humans possess in the real world, then there's no reason to worry ourselves what high level skill numbers should do. High level abilities can be abilities, and we can stop trying to have a discussion about what a "high level" output on a swim check or a use rope check is supposed to look like. And Secondary Skills and Personal Ability and Non-Weapon Proficiencies of 2nd edition all delivered on that premise in a way that 3rd edition's level scaling skills failed to deliver on its premise.

Or let's take diplomancy. In AD&D, you meet a new creature and there's a reaction roll to determine whether combat music starts. In 2nd edition, the Etiquette NWP can give you a bonus on that roll to make fighting less likely to happen. That's much better than the cluster fuck we have in 3e. Under 3rd edition rules, the Diplomacy bonuses are so off the charts that it's trivial to turn everyone you're allowed to talk to into your fanatical followers - but the act of talking to people literally takes three times as long as the battle it's intended to prevent - so there's actually nothing you can do to stop fights from happening, and what non-combat encounters you're allowed to have by DM fiat all give broken outcomes. AD&D 2nd Edition has simplistic diplomacy rules, but the outcomes aren't broken and they cover more of what needs to be covered than 3e's do.

Or lets take stronghold ownership. People do it in AD&D. It has a specific positive effect (attracting troops), and the GP cost is not otherwise something you need to constantly spend all of on improving your pants and shoes. Because higher tier equipment can't be purchased for gold, you can spend your gold on kingdom management instead of personal gear upgrades.

I wouldn't go back to playing AD&D, because overall it's a poorly edited mess full of bad ideas. Just thinking about racial level limits, class XP charts, and secret to-hit tables makes me shudder. But 3e's skill and gear systems were not good and we could probably do better with a partial roll-back.

-Username17

I wonder, and this is perhaps because most of my gaming sensibilities are rooted in old school nonsense, if a skill system is even necessary. I mean yes, of course an rpg has give it's players some resolution mechanic to determine whether or not PC's successfully climb mount kilimanticore or swim the hydra river, and how difficult it is to do so. Of course. But I wonder if there need to be dedicated skills, or if these things should fall under ability checks with the assumption that all adventurers are broadly capable at adventuring activities because defying death is their job.

Mundane skills are kind of a low-level concept. It feels like the rogue's Open Locks % only matters the first few levels. Hercules and Rand Al'Thor and Harry Dresden don't really give a fuck about a locked door. Why have a complicated subsystem for something that's not even going to matter after level 5? I mean, 3E's skill system mostly just added bigger numbers anyway, which much like damage bonuses don't fucking matter at all when magic gets to circumvent hit points and skill rolls entirely.

I'd rather see something that grants actual agency. Like the fighter rolls an ordinary STR check to jump a 5' ravine, but takes "Mighty Leap" to gain an actual fly speed. I think skills themselves should circumvent rolls and DC's much like magic does, even if "Cat's Grace" is just an autosuccess on DC =/<N.

[Hiram McDaniels]

I would hazard a guess that a sizable portion of the retro crowd would be absolutely fine with a game that has simple, modern rules, like a 3.5 mod where you removed feats and spells and replaced them with a handful of class features built directly into the classes (this would not be compatible with existing Monster Manuals or anything, but it would be very modern in its design sensibilities with its three-save system and BAB instead of THAC0 and so on), so long as you packaged that game with a few really well-designed dungeons to crawl with very simple 70s-flavored plotlines about the forces of evil menacing a nearby village from their underground fortress and please go stab them all to death brave heroes.

This is a thing that exists; it's called "Castles and Crusades". Some old school guys love it, but it's still a little too modern for hardcore OSR fundamentalists. These are guys who won't admit that ascending AC is an improvement over AD&D even when it's proven to be objectively better.

I'm more of an old school guy myself (though I do like 5E, big surprise). The characterization of my viewpoint in this thread is pretty accurate. I have more fun playing and running AD&D 2 and BECMI than 3/4E though I couldn't really articulate why. I mean I can tell you why I hate WBL and PC/Monster transparency and feats, but any one of you could come up with a dozen reasons why these make the game better and you probably wouldn't be wrong. Mostly, I like these games because they were what I played when I was 14 and was having the most fun with D&D and that's the whole story. So guilty as charged I guess.

[Mechalich]

Mundane skills are kind of a low-level concept. It feels like the rogue's Open Locks % only matters the first few levels. Hercules and Rand Al'Thor and Harry Dresden don't really give a fuck about a locked door. Why have a complicated subsystem for something that's not even going to matter after level 5?

Except people like to play at low levels. Many campaigns will never leave them, and the kind of Tolkien-esque wandering around the wilderness hunting orcs adventuring people expect from fantasy games is a low-level sort of thing.

AD&D actually posited the nature of gameplay changed when you transitioned into the high levels via is complex stronghold-based subsystems (at least initially, plenty of later modules kind of ignored that) and this is something you actually see in certain kinds of epic fantasy storytelling: Rand Al'Thor, as mentioned, is actually a really good example. He spends the first three books as a more or less wandering adventurer, and then at the end of book three transitions into epic ruler mode and his interactions with the world (and those of his nominal party members) change completely in scope. He can and does occasionally run off with a small group on adventurers, but the amount of his time spent on said actions has dropped away massively.

So yes, I suspect you don't really need a skill system once you've transitioned into fantasy superheroes mode and mundane obstacles are beneath your characters, but you definitely need one before you reach that point. The solution to that is probably to have completely different games for low-power and high-power play even in the same world, but that doesn't seem like an easy sell.